Chapter 612 - 607: The Place (Edited)

Chapter 612: Chapter 607: The Place (Edited)

Location:The Ironspine — a secret house above the pass · Kaelport — The Long Shed · Tiller’s Row

Date/Time:17–21 Flamefade 9943 AZI, Grindday night to Temperday (outside)

Realm:Lower Realm

Eleven hundred and forty-two was the sum. Jayde had added the six rings on the workshop wall three times before she let herself write the sum under them, and when she had written it she stood and looked at it, and the chalk had snapped in her fingers without her knowing she was gripping it.

Cangwei had said four hundred, perhaps five, and marked it as a guess, and nobody in the room had thought she was wrong. The cats and the quintet had counted what they could see from a ridge or a hedge: one hall at one meal, one yard at one bell. The low buildings had held the rest. Bunks three high. Children sleeping two to a bunk. Eleven hundred and forty-two children in six valleys.

She had planned for five hundred. She had a list of everything five hundred children would need, in her own hand, two sheets long, and she had planned it in the first inside night after the cart from Ostrey, because she did not touch a place she could not leave, and she did not take a thing she had nowhere to put.

She folded the two sheets in half and put them in the brazier.

"Isha," she said.

+++

He took her up into the Ironspine that night, outside, by a road nobody on this continent had used in a very long time.

It was not a road. It was a door in the Pavilion that she had never seen, at the end of a corridor she had walked past every day for four years, and Isha opened it with two fingers and stood aside, and the cold came through it like water through a breached hull.

Snow. Black rock. Stars, the real ones, very close. And under them, built into the side of the mountain so that from a hundred paces it was only more mountain, a long low house of pale stone with its roof gone in places and its doors gone everywhere, and lines of faint gold light running along the tops of its walls under the moss, so faint she would not have seen them if she had not spent sixty-seven nights looking at worse things in the dark.

"It is called Hearthwell," Isha said. "Nobody alive knows it by any name at all." He did not come through the door at once. He stood on the Pavilion side of it with his tails gathered round him and looked out at the house. "A school. For the children of people who were not going to come home. It has not had a child in it for longer than your Temple has had a sun on its carriages." He stepped through. "The wards are still awake. Nothing reaches it. No road. No path. No goat would think to look. From the pass below it is a shoulder of rock with snow on it."

Jayde walked the length of it in the dark.

Long halls, roofless in the middle and sound at the ends. A kitchen with three hearths the size of carts, and a stone trough fed by a spring that came out of the rock warm. Rooms in rows along the south side, small and square, with windows that looked down two thousand feet onto cloud. A room with tiers of stone benches facing a wall that had once been painted, and still was, faintly: a ring of figures with their hands joined. And at the back of the house, cut into the mountain, a long, low chamber with stone basins down both sides, twenty of them, each one big enough to lie down in.

"Baths," Isha said.

"For what?"

"For washing children." He touched the lip of the nearest basin. "It was a school. Children get dirty."

Jayde stood at the end of the chamber and looked at the twenty basins in the gold light, and thought of eleven hundred children coming out of six places at once, and how many of them would come through with lice, or a fever, or worse.

"Green will want these," she said.

"It needs a roof," she said. "Bunks. Blankets. Food for eleven hundred children for as long as it takes. Fuel. People."

"It needs people most."

"I know."

"And none of them can come back down the mountain and talk," Isha said, "until you say so. Which may be years."

"I know that too."

He looked at her, and his tails moved once, and settled.

"Then you had better ask the ones you trust," he said, "who they trust."

+++

She brought four of them into the long shed on Hammerday morning, outside, and shut the door, and lit the brazier herself.

Ryo first, because he came first, in a good coat with the rain still on it and his face arranged into the expression he wore for his father’s creditors. Then Kiran, with his satchel, who did not sit, and stood with his back to the door and his ears showing. Meifen, who had been told some of it at this trestle five days before and had not slept much since, by the look of her. And Qin, who arrived without anybody hearing him and took the stool in the corner, the same stool, and folded his hands.

She told them. Not all of it. Not the Pavilion, not the wings, not what the doctor had seen under a microscope three summers ago. Enough. Six valleys and eleven hundred and forty-two children, and a night coming, and a house on a mountain that nobody would find, and what the house needed, and that nobody who went up to it could come down again for a very long time.

When she had finished, nobody said anything for a while.

"How do the children get there?" Ryo asked.

"That is mine."

He looked at her for a moment, and then nodded, as he would have nodded at a clause in a contract he had decided not to read. "Then what’s mine?"

"Your house buys grain every autumn," Jayde said. "A great deal of it. It has for eleven generations."

"Yes."

"This autumn it buys a little more. Through three factors who have never heard of each other, into three warehouses on three roads, and none of it is ever written down anywhere as going to the same place." She paused. "It goes nowhere. It sits in the warehouses. It disappears out of them a little at a time, and your factors do not notice, because I will take it."

Ryo was quiet for a moment.

"My father will want to know what it’s for," he said.

"Then tell him."

He looked at her. Lord Ashenveil had sat across his own table from her nearly four years ago, the night his brother’s last fragment of a letter lay between them, and had listened to all of it without once interrupting, and at the end had said Then I’m in, the way another man would have said pass the salt. He had not asked her for anything since. He had paid for things nobody in the corps books could see, and said nothing about it.

"He’ll want to do more than pay for it," Ryo said.

"He already does more."

"More than you know." Ryo took a slate from inside his coat, and did not write on it yet. "There are fourteen houses at his table now, Commander. Middling, most of them. A few smaller. Every one of them pays the tithe, every season, the full measure, and every one of them has gone to the Temple at some point in the last twenty years to ask leave to build a granary, or a second mill, or a wall, or to marry a daughter into a house above theirs, and been told to wait." He turned the slate over in his fingers. "They are tired of waiting. My father has been at their tables since the night he sat at yours. They talk about the tithe, and the leave, and the Temple’s men at every wedding and every will. They talk about what it would be like to not ask." He looked at her. "They are not waiting for the Temple any more. They are waiting for you."

Jayde did not answer at once.

"Not now," she said.

"That is what he tells them." Ryo almost smiled. "It is getting harder for him to say." He began to write, very small. "Grain, beans, oil, salt. Blankets. You’ll want wool, not linen; it’s a mountain. Lamp oil. Soap. And it won’t go through three factors. It’ll go through nine, in fourteen houses’ accounts, and not one of them will ask what it’s for, because my father will tell them not to." He looked up. "How many years?"

"Plan for two."

He wrote two and underlined it, and did not say anything else.

Kiran had been standing with his back to the door the whole time. "The list," he said. "Names, villages, which valley, which hall. Somebody has to keep it, and it can’t be anywhere a courier could be stopped with it."

"It will be in one place," Jayde said. "Meifen’s hand."

Kiran looked at Meifen, and then at the satchel against his hip, and nodded. "Then I’ll run what goes to her and what comes from her. One route. Nobody on it twice." He paused. "And nobody on it knows what it’s for."

"Yes."

Qin had not moved. Jayde looked at him.

"Teachers," Qin said. "You will need them. Children who have spent months under a wall that told them to be quiet will need somebody to teach them to be loud again, and how to read, and that a question is not a punishment." He unfolded his hands. "I have, in the Academy, a number of masters who are old, and alone, and have taught their last class and know it, and are frightened of the quiet that comes after. Four of them would go to the end of the world and not write a letter home, because there is nobody at home to write to." He considered. "Six, perhaps. I will ask them myself. In my study. With the wards up."

"Thank you."

"Do not thank me yet," Qin said. "I have not told you what I will want in exchange."

"What will you want?"

"To be told, the day the children come down the mountain." He folded his hands again. "Not by a runner. By you."

"Yes," said Jayde.

+++

That left the hardest part, and it was Meifen’s, and everybody in the shed knew it.

"People," Jayde said. "To cook. To wash. To sit up at night with a child who wakes screaming and does not know why. Eleven hundred children. Sixty adults at the least, a hundred would be better." She looked at Meifen. "And every one of them goes up that mountain knowing they will not come down for years, and cannot send a word to anybody while they are there."

Meifen had been looking at her own hands on the trestle. She looked up.

"Then they can’t be anybody’s," she said.

Nobody spoke.

"Not anybody’s mother. Not anybody’s husband. Nobody waiting at a door for them." Meifen’s voice was very level. "If they’ve got family, they’ll write. They’ll have to. Somebody’ll come looking. You can’t ask a woman with grandchildren to go up a mountain and not come down." She turned her hand over on the trestle, palm up. "Old ones. Widowed. The ones who’ve buried their children. There’s an almshouse on Tiller’s Row with forty of them in it and they sit on the bench outside all day and nobody comes. There’s more in every town." She paused. "Nobody would miss them. And they’d miss nothing, going."

It was said flatly, the way her father would have said that a bar was the wrong temper for the job. Jayde heard what it cost her anyway.

"Will they go?" Jayde asked.

"Some." Meifen looked at the brazier. "If somebody asks them right. Not to be useful. To be needed. That’s different, and they’ll know which it is before you’ve finished the sentence."

"Then you ask them."

"I know," said Meifen. "I knew that when I sat down."

+++

The almshouse on Tiller’s Row had a bench outside it, as Meifen had said, and on Hammerday afternoon there were nine old people sitting on it in the thin autumn sun, and Meifen sat down at the end of it in her First Company coat and did not say anything for a while.

Jayde watched from across the road, by the bathhouse wall, in her own coat and her own disguise.

Meifen did not make a speech. She talked to the old man beside her about the weather, and then about his knees, and then about the forge at Loam Hollow, which he had known when he was young and Halvar’s father had had it. Then she told him, in a low voice, that there were children who needed looking after, a long way off, for a long time, and that whoever went could not come back or write until it was done, and that she could not tell him where or why, and that there would be a bed and a fire and work every day, and that the children had nobody.

The old man listened to all of it with his hands on his stick.

"How long?" he asked.

"Years. Two, maybe more."

"I’m seventy-one."

"I know."

He was quiet a while. "Nobody’s asked me for anything," he said, "since my Hennet died. Eleven years." He looked down the bench at the others. "Will there be a garden?"

"I’ll make sure of it."

"Then put my name down."

Meifen moved along the bench to the next one, and the next. Some said no. Most of them said no, at first, and then sat for a while in the sun, and called her back.

At the end of the bench there was a small old woman in a gray shawl with her hands folded in her lap, who had not said a word all afternoon and had listened to every one of them. When Meifen sat down beside her, she did not wait to be asked.

"I was a nurse," she said. "On the river, when the fever came through in the bad year. I sat up with forty children in one week and buried nine of them." Her hands did not move in her lap. "I’ve been sitting on this bench for forty years waiting for somebody to need me again." She looked at Meifen with eyes that had not quite stopped being sharp. "You’re going to tell me it’s a long way and I can’t come back. I heard you. I don’t care where it is." She stood up, slowly, using the back of the bench. "When do I go?"

By dusk Meifen had twenty-three names on the slate. By the end of Hammerday, from three more almshouses and a widows’ row in Hessen and the back pews of two shrines, she had sixty-eight. Not one of them was anybody’s.

She brought the slate to the long shed after dark and put it on the trestle in front of Jayde without a word, and Jayde read every name on it.

"Sixty-eight," Jayde said.

"Seventy by Grindday, maybe." Meifen sat down heavily. "The nurse is called Orsa. She wants to know if she can bring her own scissors."

"She can bring her own scissors."

"I told her that." Meifen looked at her hands. "They know they’re not coming back for years. I told every one of them twice. I made them say it back to me." She was quiet a moment. "Not one of them asked why."

"Because it was you asking."

"Because nobody’s asked them anything in years," said Meifen, "and they’d have said yes to a stranger." She looked up. "That’s what I hate. That it was that easy."

+++

On Temperday night Jayde went up to Hearthwell for the last time before it was full.

The roofs were on. Not well, not beautifully, but the snow stayed out; the quintet had worked through three nights carrying timber Ryo’s factors had bought for something else, and Hulong had set the beams without a word of complaint and then a great many words of complaint about the beams. There were bunks in the rooms along the south side, eleven hundred and forty-two of them and some over, and the some over was not an accident, built of new pine that still smelled of resin. Blankets on every one, folded square: wool, not linen. The three hearths in the kitchen were laid and not lit. There were sacks of grain along one wall to the ceiling, and barrels of oil, and salt in crocks, and a long table down the middle of the hall with benches either side, and on the painted wall of the room with the stone tiers somebody had pinned a sheet of paper on which, in Qin’s plain upright hand, was written the alphabet.

At the back of the house, in the long chamber, Green was standing over the twenty stone basins with her arms folded.

"Eleven hundred children out of six schools at once," she said, without turning round. "Lice. Fevers. Whatever they have been fed. Whatever they have been sleeping in." She looked down the row of basins. "I would like more basins."

"So would I."

"I will make do with these." Green unfolded her arms. "I always do."

Isha was waiting at the door in the corridor of the Pavilion, the one that opened onto snow, with Eden beside him and a small black cat at his feet.

The cat had been white once. White, with blue eyes and a ribbon at each ear, for every year Jayde Ashford had carried it about the Academy, and half the Academy could have described Jayde Ashford’s white kitten to anybody who asked. Since the mountain Takara went small in his own black, with his own amber eyes. If anybody had asked him why, he would have said that a white cat on a dark road was a lamp, and that he had been a lamp for long enough.

"Explain it to me once more," Jayde said. "The way you will explain it to the others."

"Each of you who breaks a wall," Isha said, "will carry my mark on your palm for one night. When the breath comes, and the wall falls, you open the Pavilion where you stand. The children come through into it, and out of it again, here, before any one of them has finished blinking. They will not see the Pavilion. They will not see anything but a dark room against a hill, and then a warm hall on a mountain with an old woman standing in the door." He paused. "It is not difficult. It is only a great many children at once."

"And the women in white?"

"Not through here." Isha’s tails stilled. "Never through here. Whatever they carry, it does not come into the Pavilion, and it does not come to this house."

"No," Jayde said. "They go to North Kessig. A corps tent on dead ground."

She walked once more down the long hall between the empty bunks with one hand trailing along the ends of them, counting without meaning to, and at the far end she stopped at the door of the kitchen and looked back.

Eleven hundred and forty-two beds. Sixty-eight old people asleep tonight in almshouses and widows’ rows with a word from Meifen in their ears. Six teachers in Qin’s study with the wards up. Nine factors buying grain in fourteen houses’ accounts, and not one of them asking why. One list, in one hand.

She had not touched a single school yet. She would not, until this was done.

It was done.

The old people would come up the night before the breath. Meifen would bring them to the long shed after dark, by twos and threes, with their bundles and Orsa’s scissors, into a dark room at the back with the shutters closed, and they would step through a door they could not see into a warm hall on a mountain, and never know what had been in between.

"Tomorrow night," she said to Isha, "I will tell them."

"Tell who?"

"The breakers. What they are carrying, and where it goes." She looked at the bunks. "And the cats. Something is coming down the column road before the end of the month. I want to know what, and when, before it gets there."

At her feet, the small black cat lifted its head.

Amaya goes at dusk tomorrow, Takara said. She has already asked for the coast. She did not ask permission to ask. A pause. I did not expect otherwise.